I just installed LMDE201204 Mate/Cinnamon 32bit on my laptop which has a built-in miniPCIe Atheros AR-5001 wireless G adapter (ath5k driver). Since I want to use wireless N, I installed an external PCMCIA card called Linksys WPC300N v1. I have Windows and Ubuntu on this laptop and Broadcom STA (i.e. wl) wireless driver which works fine for wireless N connections.

With LMDE201204, Broadcom STA doesn't seem to work, so I installed b43-fwcutter and firmware-b43-installer via Software Manager. When finished, I tried typing:

After this I tried to configure wireless connection in NM, but it was difficult to do so because either nothing happens or the fields were not available. Eventually I managed to configure. Signal strength was only 1 Mbps.

Then wireless connection was lost forever.

Now I got solid pilot light on the adapter card for LINK and POWER for the first time ever, but I keep getting authentication prompts for wireless network connection secrets and permission to change network settings. I think NM still has a long way to go until the release of LMDE final edition. By the way, I also tried WICD but it does not work for PPPOE wireless connection yet.

I gave up on LMDE. In LMDE, I installed broadcom-sta-common which is the only one available, via synaptic. Under lspci -nnk, the screen shows only the Broadcom BCM 4321 wireless b/g/n adapter but not kernel driver wl. If I purge wl and replace it with firmware-b43-installer, the screen shows b43-pci-bridge as kernel driver in use and the PCMCIA card shows 2 solid pilot lights but no wireless. For some reasons Network Manager with static IP cannot send wireless secret passphrase to the system, so wireless authentication requests keep popping up with either wl or b43 installed.